1) End of August: Look for a registration sheet on the Healing Outdoors webpage as I offer monthly guided healing walks on Whidbey Island, where trees are more plentiful than people. Using my knowledge from thousands of hours on Whidbey Island trails, I will select a route based on needs of each group of up to 10 folks, open to anyone. Everyone will receive a copy of my book of 20 simple nature connection exercises. Leave your desk and life stresses and reconnect your senses to the feedback loop of nature.

2) Every 2 weeks: Newsletter article on the topic of healing stress and trauma via nature connection, combining real-time autobiography in my own nature adventures and publications by ecopsychologists. These articles will form a skeleton of work using the Natural Systems Thinking Process toward my own master's degree in Applied Ecopsychology.

3) Creating a database of nature connection exercises anyone can do from a variety of environments via the feedback and suggestions of people participating in Healing Outdoors events.

4) Design and write up a 2-day nature reconnection retreat program for family caregivers in hospitals, who I would add to the list in the quote below (along with anyone stuck in a cubicle without windows and medical transcriptionists listening 8+ hours a day to dictated reports of patient medical traumas for hospitals ; ), something I happen to understand too well).

"In the early 1980s, I began to wonder about practical applications and asked myself, “Which groups of people experience a lot of emotional duress and might benefit from a view of nature?” The answer was hospital patients and prisoners." - Roger S. Ulrich

Grateful to read these words today 22 years after they were written for Earth Summit.

Declaration of Interdependence

This we know:We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.We are the breath of the forests of the land, and the plants of the sea.We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell.We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes.We share a common present, filled with uncertainty.And we share a common future, as yet untold.We humans are but one of thirty million species weaving the thin layer of life enveloping the world.The stability of communities of living things depends upon this diversity.Linked in that web, we are interconnected – using, cleansing, sharing and replenishing the fundamental elements of life.Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its resources and the energy from the sun, and therefore has limits to growth.For the first time, we have touched those limits.When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.

This we believe:Humans have become so numerous and our tools so powerful that we have driven fellow creatures to extinction, dammed the great rivers, torn down ancient forests, poisoned the earth, rain and wind, and ripped holes in the sky.Our science has brought pain as well as joy; our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions.We are learning from our mistakes, we are mourning our vanished kin, and we now build a new politics of hope.We respect and uphold the absolute need for clean air, water and soil.We see that economic activities that benefit the few while shrinking the inheritance of many are wrong.And since environmental degradation erodes biological capital forever, full ecological and social cost must enter all equations of development.We are one brief generation in the long march of time; the future is not ours to erase.So where knowledge is limited, we will remember all those who will walk after us, and err on the side of caution.

This we resolve:All this that we know and believe must now become the foundation of the way we live.At this turning point in our relationship with Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity, to interdependence.

Currently I am 6 days into a 30 Days of Fear Challenge in which participants commit to one of three daily things:

1) Do something you fear. 2) Do something you have put off or procrastinated about. 3) Do something you have never done before. This week I visited some admirable family caregivers in a hospital, got outside and took these photos of a sculpture whose meaning dovetailed beautifully with all my insights about fear. It was a reunion of sorts with this section of very familiar trail over my several years of living/working in Seattle and being at Children's Hospital with my own child. But the sculpture was a surprise to me. I googled the artist's intent here.

For my Fear Challenge, I am choosing specific activities, some new, some a relief to get done, some funny, some personally terrifying, but it occurred to me the moment I was walking this trail that ALL the elements of the Fear Challenge are included in caregiving. I suddenly understood why the Fear Challenge brought up all these feelings I recognized. Caregiving is full of making vigilant decisions ranging from life and death to life-altering to deciding between a series of worst case scenarios to making sure daily tasks are completed for catastrophe prevention to deciding how to introduce joy and increase quality of life inside limitations for the person being cared for.

To sit with a decision, especially within a time frame not of your own making (for a surgery or medical decision), means sitting at the edge of fear. It is during the time of decision when the fear hangs in the air. Once the decision arrives, the fear dissipates, instantaneously becomes recognizable as "no fear at all" or remains but shape shifts into something "fear less" resigned to be a portal one must walk through.One thing I am becoming more aware of is how often Life serves us despite our fears. I was walking with a caregiver in this moment and happened upon this sculpture created to represent natural cycles of forest renewal while studying ecopsychology and doing a fear challenge. "Not Yet" and "Already" speak loud and clear.

How do you see Life serves you? I would love to hear in the comments.

Call for Caregiver Blog Posts

I welcome guest posts from people currently caregiving. If you have anything to share about how important connecting to nature has been for you or an ill loved one, please send it through the Contact button here: CONTACT

I am a compulsive proofreader so you can send anything in rough form of any length (even a sentence or paragraph) and I can proofread and post it. Healing Outdoors has a small friendly readership, but it is a public forum, so if you wish to leave out details of your situation, you are welcome to post anonymously. We all benefit from your sharing!

I ordered this little gem of a handbook as soon as I discovered it. It contains everything you need to know about the benefits of forest bathing or "shinrin yoku," how to lead small groups, suggestions for regular home nature connection practices, resources lists, a walk evaluation form to copy, and great wisdom about allowing a group to form their own connections.

Someday I would love to be able to afford the trip to California, costs of camping and the 5-day training to become a forest guide through the program M. Amos Clifford has expertly created.

The more I learn about approaches to nature connection and lineages within the field of ecopsychology/ecotherapy, I see there are varied approaches to the questions "how many senses do humans have?" and "does nature welcome us immediately or want us to seek permission?" To me personally, whether a human is scientifically identified to have 53 senses or 8 matters less than the actual connection and healing experience I and others have.

I especially appreciate the humor sprinkled throughout the book, as exemplified here in the description of an end of walk tea ritual: "This tea is made of wild plants. . . that bugs have walked on. . . maybe even birds have poo'ed on them. . . it's not just a tea, it's an adventure!"

(For the concerned, boiled water helps). The author devotes space in his handbook to safety and common sense. "Hazardous or not? It's a good idea to know, and to know when you don't know." (p. 9).

It occurs to me I have been extremely fortunate. I wonder if I have a little "nature angel" of some sort because without any real wilderness training I have gone on long solo hikes often outside the zone of telecommunications for at least 25 years without injury or problem. Some of what I have done defies common sense. So the arena of wilderness training is where I want to gain more skills if I am going to properly and safely guide folks who may not themselves have such a "nature angel" working overtime. . . and for such a day when that angel decides to take a nap. ; )

I thoroughly enjoyed developing this little booklet of 20 nature connection exercises with over 50 photos taken by me and my daughter (who wished her full name and photo withheld).

Nothing earth-shaking or ground breaking here, but great fun to compile. I have many more nature photos to choose from for another more detailed book to include resources specifically for family caregivers as I continue my daily forays into the woods and wild spaces within proximity to me.

It started as a course requirement for Project NatureConnect to come up with a single exercise that could be done to help people connect to nature and turned into 20!

The link to purchase this book on Amazon is listed on the Healing Outdoors Store page but I post it here as well: Naturography

I have no desire to become an accredited "counselor" in the standard sense, but I look forward to continuing my education journey in the field of ecopsychology and ecotherapy so that I can serve and reach more people hungry for this "return home" connection.